Mostly funny because he can't real opinion polling or even the damned census. There was indeed a silent majority like the one he fantasies about in the 1970s, even the early 1980s, but no more - and certainly not in the future. More evidence that numeracy and statistical literacy need to be a bigger part of high school education.

zeroprime posted:

The Democrats were historically a party of the south and filled with racists. When civil rights became a big issue and LBJ helped force through civil rights laws that prevented racial discrimination, the Southern Democrats became fed up with the Democratic party. Guess who welcomed all those racist southerners with open arms, and who those people still vote for today.

"Individual Freedom" as a superseding ideology is to let people refuse to serve coloreds and foreigners at their diner in Bumfuck Mississippi or Shithole Arizona.

Actually, no, the Democrats were not "historically a party of the south and filled with racists."

Just as with today (e.g. Blue Dogs and more liberal Democrats like John Lewis), the Democratic Party was incredibly diverse, appealing to poor, minority, immigrant groups in the North and major urban areas, while the Democratic Party of the South was dominated by states' rights supporters and white racists. Conversely, the early Republican Party pretty much revolved around a single issue, reducing and/or ending slavery.

From the end of the Civil War to the beginning of World War I, the Republican Party shifted its focus to numerous progressive policy platforms, from corporate regulation, to environmental protections, to progressive income taxes, but as exemplified by Teddy Roosevelt. After the party split in the 1912 election, the Republican Party drifted heavily away from these progressive positions and more towards the corporatist, elitist positions we know them for today, like the insidious corporate involvement of the Harding Administration and the refusal to enforce business regulations of the Coolidge Administration, which led to the Great Depression.

During this whole period, the Democratic Party still maintained that extreme diversity of Urban, northern Democrats supporting progressive policies for the downtrodden and working class, while the Southern Democrats were mostly interested in keeping the federal government out of their business of persecuting African Americans. The progressive Democrats had repeatedly tried to exorcise their conservative counterparts from the Party, which generally did not work, as seen in FDR's attempt to purge white, southern, racist Democrats from the Democratic Party in favor of progressive Democrats in the 1938 midterm elections, though he was primarily motivated by their opposition to his New Deal programs.

You are correct that all the conservative, southern Democrats, known as Dixiecrats, joined the Republican Party after the Civil Rights Movement, which is something that Cal Thomas intentionally leaves out. He also fails to note that the votes on civil rights legislation like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not fall along party lines, but rather upon regional lines, i.e. nearly all of the legislators of both parties from northern states voted in favor of civil rights legislation, while the South nearly unanimously opposed it. More importantly, we need to look at the ideologies of these legislators, not simply their party identification, which reveals that the southern legislators were far more conservative than their northern counterparts, meaning that segregation was an ideology of conservatism, while the civil rights supporters were mostly progressives (e.g. MLK jr. was extremely progressive, being anti-war, anti-poverty, pro-government social programs, pro-women rights and health, etc.), but with some conservative support.

Assholes like Cal Thomas are whitewashing history and completely covering up its nuances and complexities in favor of fiction that supports his pre-existing ideas. He ignores what he doesn't like (e.g. Nixon and Reagan using the Southern Strategy and Reagan actually opposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964) and twists other historical events to his benefit.

quote:

Unfortunately, a reliance on family and faith, which allowed many African Americans to survive the horrors of Reconstruction

Yeah, black people were really getting poo poo on during the reconstruction. Wait, no. The other way around. It was after reconstruction ended and the Federal troops were withdrawn that they really got hosed in the rear end again, reconstruction was the period in which there were elected black legislators from the south and they were being treated like human beings

icantfindaname posted:

Wait a minute, did this just say that segregation was "a nearly universally accepted good"?

Or are they referring to getting rid of segregation as a nearly universally accepted good? Because the way things are going, I'm not sure which it is.

He is saying that since striking down segregation was good but that the author (who is black) sees all old things as bad and changing them as good because of that. Given the editorial it looks like he's complaining that women can have jobs and use birth control now.

icantfindaname posted:

Wait a minute, did this just say that segregation was "a nearly universally accepted good"?

Or are they referring to getting rid of segregation as a nearly universally accepted good? Because the way things are going, I'm not sure which it is.

#2--but the commenter is making such a horrible inference from that assumption that it's pretty much discarding the good that the civil rights movement brought, because it apparently skewed the perceptions of all those uppity minorities.

While we're on the subject of race, enjoy this classy letter from my local paper asserting that abortion is as bad as enslaving black people!

The Pantagraph posted:

With the passage of the enhanced fugitive slave act, Abraham Lincoln grimly observed that everything militated against the slave. He had virtually nowhere left to turn. The North was shut. Canada unsafe. People were compelled to hunt him down.

Slavery was on the brink to drown an entire nation. It did not happen. Why? Our president courageously led his nation into a new birth of freedom.

With the enhanced right to abortion, everything militates against the baby. Prior to it, at first, one trimester to freedom. Then two. Then three. And then — for the very lucky — only birth itself. But, finally, after the act — no escape allowed. Why?

Our president leads his nation into abortion slavery, compelling us to help him in this new birth of decadence.

Celebrate Lincoln

A few pages ago someone posted a letter that stated abortion was worse than what Jerry Sandusky did. Same paper. I'm losing faith in humanity.

There's a line in The Bridge to Terabithia where the boy is talking about one of his teachers, who had been a hippy in the 60's. He mentions that, and says "but since the war is over, it's okay to like peace now."

It sums up the Conservative mindset nicely. Peace isn't an object good or bad, only when the "right kind" of people want peace is it okay.

Ekplixi posted:

While we're on the subject of race, enjoy this classy letter from my local paper asserting that abortion is as bad as enslaving black people!

A few pages ago someone posted a letter that stated abortion was worse than what Jerry Sandusky did. Same paper. I'm losing faith in humanity.

Let's follow this letter down the rabbit hole. Let's accept the writer's assertion that Lincoln started the war as a holy crusade to abolish slavery. Let's also assume that he wants our current president, Barack Obama, to start similar action to stop the proponents of abortion. About 2% of the entire 1860 population of the USA was killed as a direct result of the Civil War, so following the logic of the letter writer, according to current estimates, he'd accept the deaths of about six and a quarter million American citizens to abolish abortion.

cheerfullydrab posted:

Let's follow this letter down the rabbit hole. Let's accept the writer's assertion that Lincoln started the war as a holy crusade to abolish slavery. Let's also assume that he wants our current president, Barack Obama, to start similar action to stop the proponents of abortion. About 2% of the entire 1860 population of the USA was killed as a direct result of the Civil War, so following the logic of the letter writer, according to current estimates, he'd accept the deaths of about six and a quarter million American citizens to abolish abortion.

Sounds about right. If we lived in any kind of rational world, these people would be locked up in mental hospitals and treated for whatever mental illness they have. They're demented, delusional, and dangerous.

Feather posted:

Sounds about right. If we lived in any kind of rational world, these people would be locked up in mental hospitals and treated for whatever mental illness they have. They're demented, delusional, and dangerous.

Hey now, let's not insult people who are actually mentally ill.

Most of them are otherwise good people with problems, whereas the people writing these letters and editorials are terrible human beings.

Ezra Klein thinks that 'left' and 'right' are misused in American media as shorthand for whatever the two major parties' positions are (this part is true). And then abdicates any responsibility on the journalists' part to fix the problem, or even to fact check partisan statements. "it wouldn’t be a good idea for us to try." Why!? This is everything wrong with American political reporting and commentary in one post.
e: fixed link

Family Values fucked around with this message at Feb 24, 2012 around 23:35

Family Values posted:

Ezra Klein thinks that 'left' and 'right' are misused in American media as shorthand for whatever the two major parties' positions are (this part is true). And then abdicates any responsibility on the journalists' part to fix the problem, or even to fact check partisan statements. "it wouldn’t be a good idea for us to try." Why!? This is everything wrong with American political reporting and commentary in one post.
e: fixed link

I like Ezra Klein, but this is really terrible. Nearly every example he gives is a pretty clear example of the ultra-conservative shift in the Republican party and the failures of the media to hold them accountable. He says the media shouldn't police political ideologies, but they don't even examine current events with recent history in mind.

Shalebridge Cradle posted:

I like Ezra Klein, but this is really terrible. Nearly every example he gives is a pretty clear example of the ultra-conservative shift in the Republican party and the failures of the media to hold them accountable. He says the media shouldn't police political ideologies, but they don't even examine current events with recent history in mind.

edit: Your link worked, but now its broken?

It also has to do with the false premise that Democrat=liberal. Obama is certainly not a liberal, but he gets labeled that way by the right wing which currently dominates the GOP just because he is relatively liberal compared to their extreme conservatism.

The other problem with Klein's examples is that many formerly Republican policies were recently adopted by Democrats as compromises to try and bring conservative Democrats and rational Republicans to the table, e.g. Bush tax cut extensions with payroll tax cuts, healthcare reform individual mandate, etc.

The human animal is a beautiful and terrible creature, capable of limitless compassion and unfathomable cruelty.

There's also something which tends to piss me off, which is the conflation of liberalism with socialism, which is a radically different ideology calling for a radically different society. The idea that paying taxes and getting government services has anything to do with socialism or Marx is about as widely accepted as it is complete nonsense, and this conflation makes it difficult to discuss politics in a sane way.

Pope Guilty posted:

There's also something which tends to piss me off, which is the conflation of liberalism with socialism, which is a radically different ideology calling for a radically different society. The idea that paying taxes and getting government services has anything to do with socialism or Marx is about as widely accepted as it is complete nonsense, and this conflation makes it difficult to discuss politics in a sane way.

I don't talk about politics with most people I know in real life, but when I do I try to avoid the word "liberal" and refer to myself instead as leftist, seeing as the word liberal is deeply tied to the American Democratic party, and the failure of the Democrats has been entirely in messaging and issue framing. At this point the right has total control over that word and its connotations, so there's no point in using it anymore.

Feather posted:

Sounds about right. If we lived in any kind of rational world, these people would be locked up in mental hospitals and treated for whatever mental illness they have. They're demented, delusional, and dangerous.

That's not a good view to hold at all. The people who write these letters are, despite their twisted views, American citizens. We have to live with people who hold political views opposite ours, no matter how loving insane they are. We also have to accept that they are also tax-paying and voting members of our country. Calling such people crazy is just one way to otherize them in a dangerous way. We're all Americans, together, whether we like it or not. Personally I hate like poison people who write letters such as that. Even if you disagree with them, at least please respect them as American citizens. I'm saying this as a former LF poster.

cheerfullydrab posted:

That's not a good view to hold at all. The people who write these letters are, despite their twisted views, American citizens. We have to live with people who hold political views opposite ours, no matter how loving insane they are. We also have to accept that they are also tax-paying and voting members of our country. Calling such people crazy is just one way to otherize them in a dangerous way. We're all Americans, together, whether we like it or not. Personally I hate like poison people who write letters such as that. Even if you disagree with them, at least please respect them as American citizens. I'm saying this as a former LF poster.

Please. Sharing a landmass with someone is not a sufficient basis for pretending to find their views palatable.

Bryter posted:

Please. Sharing a landmass with someone is not a sufficient basis for pretending to find their views palatable.

There's a very broad line between "find[ing someone's] views palatable" and saying that anyone who has an opinion you disagree with should be institutionalized, though. Obviously, if you disagree with the person, you are free to do so, but the notion of "this guy who thinks this should be sent to the nuthouse" has rather nasty implications.

Besides which, even if it became law, do you think that the next guy who comes along wouldn't decide that you should be thrown into a mental institution for your opinions?

Judeccahedron posted:

There's a very broad line between "find[ing someone's] views palatable" and saying that anyone who has an opinion you disagree with should be institutionalized, though. Obviously, if you disagree with the person, you are free to do so, but the notion of "this guy who thinks this should be sent to the nuthouse" has rather nasty implications.

Besides which, even if it became law, do you think that the next guy who comes along wouldn't decide that you should be thrown into a mental institution for your opinions?

I'm fairly sure that that post was hyperbolic, but it's the whole "please respect them as American citizens" approach that's just totally asinine. As if it's somehow worse to call an American crazy than anybody else in the world.

If you're so against the idea of not calling humans with opposing, ridiculous views completely insane people who deserve to be institutionalized because you share the same landmass with them, at least try and think that they're still human beings. Rational, reasonable human beings who are completely loving nuts.

cheerfullydrab posted:

If you're so against the idea of not calling humans with opposing, ridiculous views completely insane people who deserve to be institutionalized because you share the same landmass with them, at least try and think that they're still human beings. Rational, reasonable human beings who are completely loving nuts.

So are the terms "rational" and "reasonable" only mutually exclusive with "completely loving nuts" to me then?

What Dick Cheney Gets Wrong

by Robert Morrison posted:

I live in Maryland, where lawmakers in Annapolis may be voting to end marriage. They don’t realize that that’s what they are doing. Former Vice President Dick Cheney is said to be working the phones, trying to persuade Republican holdouts to join Democrats in ending marriage.

Why is it ending, and not just expanding marriage rights to confer the legal status of marriage on same-sex couples? Consider constitutional expert, GWU law professor Jonathan Turley. He spoke to an overflow crowd at the Newseum in 2008.

He said: “Opponents say that this will lead to polygamy. I’m for that.” Turley was wildly applauded by the audience, which included law students, congressional staffers, and, of course, enthusiastic journalists.

Turley is surely right. Recognizing same-sex couples as married will lead to polygamy and the end of marriage as a civil institution in America. That’s because when everyone can marry, there is no marriage left. That’s doubtless why Turley today is working to legalize polygamy.

Consider this thought experiment. Twin brothers announced on a TV talk show that they were gay. Under the laws proposed, can they marry? If not, why not? They’ve certainly had a “committed relationship” since before they were born. What constitutional principle could you invoke to say these twins cannot marry each other? And if these twin brothers may marry, why not a twin brother and sister?

Dick Cheney probably never met Mae West. For younger readers unfamiliar with one of Hollywood’s original blond bombshells, I’ll simply say: sailors in World War II called their large life jackets Mae Wests. (This is a family blog, after all.)

Mae West famously said: “Marriage is a great institution, but I’m not ready for an institution.” How strange that Mae West had a better understanding of civil marriage than a former Vice President of the United States, a man who was twice elected to national office by pro-family voters.

I was sent by FRC to the Philadelphia Convention of 2000, instructed to meet GOP delegates on the Platform Committee. FRC does not endorse candidates, but we are certainly permitted to comment on the parties’ platforms. I had prepared carefully to read and analyze that year’s platform on such family issues as the defense of unborn human life, the protection of marriage, preserving religious liberty, and education. Those delegates rated an “A” on all those issues, except education (because they had dropped the call to disestablish the federal education department.)

Speaking to reporters outside the platform hearings, I praised the delegates’ work. The press couldn’t care less about that. All they wanted me to do was to criticize the lesbian daughter of Dick and Lynne Cheney. What do you say about her being here?

“We’re always glad to see families brought together,” I replied. But, but, she’s sitting in the VIP box with her father and mother. I answered: “It’s certainly good to see a family united when their dad is being so honored.”

Again and again, they probed. They wanted me to bash the daughter of the Republicans’ vice presidential nominee. You and him fight. We’ll hold your coats. Again and again, I tried to steer the interviews back to the party’s platform, which was the only thing I was authorized to comment on. Don’t try to tell reporters what it means to be a man under authority.

As a result, of course, nothing I said was reported. But as my former boss, Gary Bauer, often said: You can always get news coverage by setting your hair on fire. And I don’t have hair to burn.

Then as now, Dick Cheney declined to support the Republican Party platform’s strong defense of marriage. His serious demeanor brooks no contradiction. He speaks always as if he expects to be obeyed. It’s as if they invented gravitas for him. “I have a personal situation,” he said to nodding reporters. He didn’t have to spell it out.

Cheney was wrong then and now. My wife and I have relatives who are gay. We have never rejected them. That does not mean we must agree with them. That does not mean I should slacken any effort to defend the civil institution of marriage when it is under assault.

In 2000, Dick Cheney might have considered Philadelphia’s most famous son, Benjamin Franklin. Franklin’s own son was the royal Governor of New Jersey. It was a patronage job Ben had secured for him. When his son remained loyal to the Crown, Benjamin Franklin did not refuse to sign the Declaration of Independence citing a “personal situation.” That’s one of the many reasons why we remember Ben Franklin with admiration and respect.

Dick Cheney is said to be worth hundreds of millions. His family may not suffer the devastation that comes from the breakdown of marriage. But in his recent book, Coming Apart, Charles Murray shows how the loss of marriage for the white working class in America has already had catastrophic consequences. If we seek the reason behind the great disparities in wealth that the Occupy crowd is howling about, we need look no further than the collapse of marriage. In this great cultural clash, Dick Cheney has enlisted with the forces of dissolution.

King Dopplepopolos posted:

He sounds like such a loving child. All I could hear is, "It's OUR toy, and if you get to play with it, then it must be stupid and lame! WAH!"

Also, where do they get this slippery slope bullshit? IIRC, it doesn't lead to much of anything else in any country or state where it's allowed, but they always bring it up.

Well, we've had gay marriage here in the Netherlands for years now and as a result I'm currently married to my sister, our dog and the coffeetable. I'm also afraid of being involuntarily euthanised, which happens all the time according to American presidential candidate Santorum.

Also, to put the lie into perspective, Jonathan Turley is in favor of "legalizing" polygamy meaning that it's not illegal, not that the government or churches must recognize it. He's representing some Mormon polygamists who are being charged under Utah's anti-polygamy laws. Turley is simply saying that the state can't make it a crime.

Jonathan Brooks posted:

I would like to thank Rachel Vinyard for her thoughtful response, and I relish the opportunity to have a public discourse on this subject.
Anti-abortion and pro-abortion are the correct words.
Anti-abortion advocates can oppose the vast majority of abortions while still understanding the need for them in rare cases of health, surprise sex, or incest. In the same manner, one can be anti-homicide yet still accept the need to take another's life in a case of self-defense or capital punishment.
The use of the term pro-choice is yet another ambiguous euphemism used to manipulate an argument in favor of the pro-abortion side. Pro-abortion means in favor of abortion.What exact choice does pro-choice represent? A marijuana supporter could be pro-choice (they want the choice to smoke weed legally). The word pro-choice is so ambiguous it could apply to many different subjects.
Furthermore, pro-choice is misleading since anyone who says they are anti-choice with regard to abortion appears to be a misogynist or fascist, even though almost everyone is anti-choice on some issue. It is against our psyche to oppose another's choice, yet every day the laws and rules of society limit choice.First, consider the state of slavery in the United States around the late 1850s. A class of humans was subjugated, mistreated and sometimes killed out of economic convenience. The slaves were declared property of their owner and denied citizenship, and therefore rights, by courts in Dred Scott vs. Sandford (1857). Slave owners were given the choice to do what they wished with their property without any penalty of law. Those who owned slaves were undoubtedly pro-choice regarding the choice to keep slaves. One could truthfully say that slave owners were denied the right or choice to own slaves after the Civil War.
Now consider abortion in 2012. A certain class of humans is being destroyed out of financial convenience (92% of abortions occur for reasons besides surprise sex, incest or health concerns). Babies are denied personhood by courts and denied basic rights under the law. Women are allowed the choice to do what they wish with their unborn children because it is their body, and therefore property. Can you see the parallels?
The pro-abortion movement has several contradictions.Take, for an example, a mother who has a week-old child but can no longer support the cost or needs of the child. Why do they not support her right to choose to drown, strangle or toss the baby into a dumpster? Is she not saving the unwanted child from a life of poverty? Is she not improving her situation by the termination of the unwanted?
The truth is that we find a mother killing her newborn abhorrent even if she uses the exact reasons that she would to abort that child months earlier.
However, choice advocates who deny women the right to rid themselves of an unwanted newborn will vehemently protect the right to pay a doctor to abort the unwanted unborn.Jonathan Brooks is a civil engineering sophomore.

Kro-Bar posted:

Anytime I need to see your face I just close my eyes
And I am taken to a place
Where your crystal minds and magenta feelings
Take up shelter in the base of my spine
Sweet like a chica cherry cola
-Cheap Trick

Nap Ghost

Kro-Bar posted:

I live in a college town where all of the opinion columnists are terrible people.

Orange Devil posted:

College newspapers are lovely, full stop.

Agreed. This paper has gone really downhill this year when compared to previous semesters. The new editor isn't a journalism major who clearly doesn't know what he's doing, which translates into running particularly nutball stories. Early this semester, for example, he ran a front-page, above-the-fold story about a new strip club opening in town with the title "Diamond in the Muff"

Kro-Bar posted:

Under that logic, we shouldn't be using the term "abortion" because it applies to other fields/concepts, like NASA aborting rocket launches or the military aborting missions with failed/unreachable objectives.

The term "pro-choice" is only "ambiguous" if you're an anti-abortion rear end in a top hat trying to intentionally mischaracterize other people's beliefs and motives.

I'M ESCAPING TO THE ONE PLACE THAT HASN'T BEEN CORRUPTED BY CAPITALISM...

SPACE!

Honestly if I were pro-life I'm sure I'd be frustrated at the clever sloganeering lying behind the term "pro-choice". I'm sure that the vaguely progressive connotation the word holds is part of why the pro-abortion movement adopted it so widely.

The real issue with that column is that he's begging the question. The reason a pro-choice person is comfortable with abortion is because they don't think the fetus is a living organism. Thus it has no rights. In a case where there aren't two living entities with competing claims to a right, there's no reason not to accept a woman's right to choose what happens to her own body. Hence if you don't think that the fetus is a person then of course the only relevant question is what you are personally choosing to do with your body.

He begins his argument by already assuming that a fetus is the same thing as a baby. From that perspective there are two competing claims to two competing rights - the right to choose and the right to life. If you don't share this assumption nothing else he wrote is even coherent, let alone sensible.

Of course for him to explain why the baby is actually a person he'd almost certainly have to admit he thinks it has a soul, thus revealing that at its root abortion is a religious issue more than anything else.

This guy would probably freely admit that his reason for opposing abortion is based in religion. The column I posted is his response to a response to this column.

Fetuses are given less rights than convicted murderers

quote:

"Every child is a wanted child."
We've all heard it as the justification for abortion.
It is the idea an unwanted child would live a horrible life and therefore should not have the opportunity to live that life.
I recently had a rather lengthy discussion on Facebook with a group of pro-abortion men and women. In this debate, one woman referred to fetuses as "parasites."
A man insisted on using the phrases "human tissue" and "zygote" when referring to an unborn human.
A different woman compared her uterus to an apartment, meaning she could kick out whatever occupies it.All these euphemisms are intended to deny the unborn child any shred of humanity, just as Jews in Nazi Germany or slaves in America were denied any humanity by the courts.
Furthermore, the Jews and slaves were referred to as animals and sub-human by the courts of the time.
One of the men in the group proceeded to tell me about the tail and gills of an embryo and how it was indistinguishable from an embryo of a horse or pig.
Sure, it looks different, but what he didn't say was that the "tail" is the spine of the growing child (you do have a tailbone after all), and that the "gills" develop into facial features such as the ears, nose, eyes and mouth.
It also has human DNA so to compare it to any other animal is fallacious. It was just another weak attempt to de-humanize the fetus (Latin word meaning "offspring").
The fetus must be completely de-humanized because the methods of destroying the unwanted are absolutely despicable.
Look up "methods of abortion" in Google and find out for yourself.
The procedures range from using saline solution which poisons the unwanted to using forceps that literally tear the child apart and out of the womb.
The common instruments seem to be extreme suction or the curette, a sharpened spoon-like instrument for scraping away at tissue.
Often older fetuses' heads have to be crushed in order to expel them from the cervix.
These are the methods that are used to remove "unwanted human tissue" from a woman's body.The unborn children of our society are treated with more disdain and cruelty than mass murderers, rapists and stray animals.
Imagine the uproar if we were to find out that dogs and cats in animal shelters were killed by dismemberment or suction.Remember that animals like those mercifully put down in shelters are often labeled "unwanted."
So, of course, the unborn must be denied humanity, for even unwanted animals are treated better.
Furthermore, the criminals of our society are treated to a cocktail of calming depressants before they are finally "put to sleep."
Embryos and fetuses are torn apart by medical instruments without any anesthetics or analgesics.
A Guttmacher poll showed that 93 percent of women had an abortion for reasons other than surprise sex, incest or medical necessity.
This indicates that such savage procedures were only performed out of convenience to avoid a change in lifestyle. That is truly shocking.

It's pretty much just a lazy appeal to emotion based in a blatant ignorance of how abortions are actually performed.
If I was the editor of the paper I'd tell him to cite his loving wild claims or he isn't getting published. His ranting is basically a lovely Facebook post.